Baggini (who
was born in England to an Italian father) already thinks of himself as an
outsider, and he gets to the heart of English difficulties with
multiculturalism in his excellent chapter “Culture Shocks,” important reading
if one wants to understand the mind of the typical Brexit voter. My only concern (as the author
readily admits) is that he might be accused of being an “apologist” for the
intolerance he encounters.[2]
The next chapter, “Illiberal Democrats” looks at Rotherham’s communitarianism
(the most polysyllabic word you will find in the book) which, as the author
simplifies, is a philosophic anti-abstraction combining attenuated rights with local responsibilities.[3]
If this definition is still unclear to
the reader, allow Baggini’s discussion of the remainder of his stay in Rotherham
to convey an underappreciated way of political thinking in England - often considered
the fountainhead of liberalism instead because of its so-called traditional freedoms.
There is much
more wonderful analysis of working life available to the everyday reader in Welcome to Everytown, including chapters on gambling, holidaymaking,
and the proverbial English pub. Overall
it seems reminiscent of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North
and South (1855) which, as that novel’s title suggests, depicted the social differences between the gentrified South and commercialized North in the midst of the Industrial Revolution.
Given
England’s past “greatness” – memories of Empire, and all that - one might see
its current Brexit predicament as the culmination of the logic of postcolonialism,
as Scotland and Northern Ireland now might have motive to leave the United Kingdom. How could such blundering come to pass? One might begin modestly by peering into the
minds of Englishmen north of the metropolis of London, as Baginni so eloquently
does in the microcosm of Rotherham, well before the fact.
[1] Julian Baggini, Welcome to Everytown: A Journey into the English Mind (London:
Granta Books, 2008), p.72.
[2] Ibid., p. 57.